After matins on Easter in the early fifteenth century, the nuns and clergy of Barking Abbey performed two ceremonies in the church that blended Latin chant with movement, props, and costumes: the Elevatio, whichportrays the Harrowing of Hell and Christ’s Resurrection, and the Visitatio sepulchri, where the Three Marys (Mary Magdalen, Mary mother of James, and Mary Salome) visit Christ’s tomb and, after Mary Magdalen meets Jesus, announce Christ’s Resurrection. Such “dramatic liturgical ceremonies”—terminology Blanc uses to convey their fluid and dual nature—were a relatively common feature of medieval monastic life: Elevatio, Visitatio and other similar ceremonies survive from male and female monasteries across Europe.
Blanc’s monograph seeks to understand how the performance of these two dramatic liturgical ceremonies affected the performers and audience at Barking Abbey. She does this by analyzing the Barking ceremonies in their historical context and by staging a modern performance of them. The first chapter, roughly 100 pages, situates the Elevatio and Visitatio ceremonies within the medieval world of Barking Abbey and investigates the themes and messages of the ceremonies. Mixing textual with visual storytelling, the Elevatio and Visitatio encouraged the understanding of and meditation on scriptural and hagiographic stories. These ceremonies, particularly the Three Marys who knelt before Christ and kissed his feet, modelled compassionate devotion for Christ and his suffering. As befits Easter, the performances also highlighted themes of penance and avoidance of sin, as demonstrated when the Three Marys chanted the penitential prayer Confiteor before the abbess at the beginning of the Visitatio.
The devotional aspects of these ceremonies were intended not only for the nuns and clergy who performed them, but also for its lay parishioners, the Abbey’s tenants. The Barking nuns were clearly interested in their parishioners’ devotion, as a note in the manuscript indicates that the ceremonies were moved after matins so the parishioners (populus) could attend and thus reduce their apathy (torpor). Blanc suggests that temporal conflicts with some of the Abbey’s tenants may have contributed to the nuns’ concern about the parishioners’ perceived lack of devotion. While performing these ceremonies may have reinforced a sense of community amongst the nuns, they may also have elevated the power and prestige of the nuns and clergy before the laity. The ceremonies highlighted the authority of the abbess, while the nuns became, like Mary Magdalen, transmitters of the news of Christ’s Resurrection to the parishioners: the Abbey became a “mediator” between the laity and the divine, reinforcing its spiritual and temporal power over the parishioners. Despite the inherently speculative nature of trying to assess how a ceremony caused its audience or participants to think and feel, Blanc anchors her interpretation in the themes of the surviving books and devotional material read at Barking, as well as the documentary evidence regarding the Abbey’s relationship with its tenants.
The second chapter tests some of the hypotheses explored in the first chapter, namely how these ceremonies affected participants and audience, through a modern performance of Barking’s Elevatio and Visitatio. The performances, directed by Blanc, took place in 2018 as part of the Medieval Convent Drama Project at the University of Fribourg, which was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. To answer questions about gestures, costumes and handling props that were not indicated in the medieval texts, Blanc turned to medieval visual evidence and modern liturgical traditions for the staging. As chants for the Barking ceremonies have been lost, Blanc chose surviving chants from other Elevatio and Visitatio ceremonies, particularly from those with textual similarities and geographical proximity, notably from Dublin, Rouen, and Wilton Abbey.
To gauge the effects of these ceremonies on participants and the audience, Blanc conducted interviews with the lay performers and several Cistercian nuns who attended the performance. While the Elevatio and Visitatio ceremonies were performed twice, once in the medieval church of the Cistercian Abbey of La Maigrauge in Fribourg and once outside on the university’s campus, most of the reflections correspond to the performance in the convent church. Costumes shaped both the singing and acting, while music also influenced the staging. As both the women’s wimples and any movement hampered singing in unison, the staging became more static and solemn. Thus, acting and emotions had to be conveyed by gestures or change in the quality of singing (e.g., tempo, loudness). Yet music also enhanced the emotion of the scene, such as when Mary Magdalen encountered Christ.
The modern performances highlighted the liturgical aspects of these ceremonies, which encouraged a solemn and respectful approach on the part of the performers. Personal faith also affected the perception of the performance, with non-religious performers finding it more theatrical: for them, the costumes and the setting proved helpful for getting into the character of a medieval nun or even created discomfort at impersonating a religious person. For performers who identified as Christians, singing the chants became like praying. Both the performers and the Cistercian nuns in the audience felt that these ceremonies created a sense of connection between the past—to the lives of both the Barking nuns and the biblical figures—and the present, rooted in continued liturgical traditions and shared devotion across time. The Cistercian nuns also saw echoes of the Elevatio and Visitatio’s dramatic elements in their own processions and viewed these dramatic elements as having the potential to deepen faith and encourage devotion for performers and the laity.
Thus, Blanc argues, this modern performance showed how these medieval ceremonies were liturgical and devotional, meant to touch both performers and laity by reinforcing Scriptures and biblical stories, and by guiding faith and the emotional response. The “dramatic” nature of these ceremonies supported the liturgy and extended its reach and devotional effect, collapsing the distinction between drama and liturgy.
Beyond several copyediting errors (e.g., the date of the Domesday Book), there were occasional places where additional contextual information or deeper engagement with monastic history would have been beneficial. It may have been helpful to cite Roberta Gilchrist’s Gender and Material Culture regarding the architecture of English nunneries, for example, when discussing the separation between laity, nuns and clergy at Barking (41). For the transcription of the Elevatio and Visitatio ceremonies, which is presented as a lightly punctuated block of text (35-37), Blanc notes that the manuscript is heavily abbreviated and directs the reader towards other editions of the text which have “sightly different” (35) transcriptions, but does not elucidate her editing principles, even though decisions about the expansion of abbreviations underpin interpretation. Finally, while Blanc’s decision to focus on the Elevatio and Visitatio at Barking allowed a rich investigation of the material, the relationship between the Barking ceremonies and the corpus of other extant Visitatio and Elevatio ceremonies remains largely unaddressed. There are passing references to these other ceremonies throughout the book, where Blanc mentions some of the elements that were unique to Barking (cf. 80, 117, 118, 145-46, 187), but a more systematic explanation of the similarities in the liturgical texts and the dramatic actions between the Barking and other extant ceremonies (especially those from Wilton Abbey, a nearby female Benedictine monastery with which Barking was known to communicate), could have helped to position the Barking ceremonies within the broader corpus and thus deepen the reader’s understanding of Barking’s own novelties and innovations.
Despite these minor issues, Blanc offers a fascinating case study of Barking’s dramatic liturgical ceremonies and an example of how modern staging can elucidate scholarly questions about performance and liturgy. I would especially recommend watching the recording of the performance (the URL is provided on p. 133) while referring to the production script (Appendix 2). There, one can see the solemnity of the performance in action, as well as the inseparability of the dramatic and the liturgical elements.